Painting, Patronage and Politics under the Tudors

it has to be said that this is an absolutely enormous subject and there is a literally library's full of books about this but in my first lecture I am dealing with a period from which very little actually survives we often don't know what people had in their houses and how things were shown but I think we do know enough to bring out some important points about the uses and appreciations of what we would call art now I'm going to use this term art to cover man-made objects that weren't purely utilitarian things that were made to please the eye as well as to serve the hand now I don't think anybody in the 16th century would have thought of art as we do it wasn't a sort of category of activity undertaken by artists there was no if you like sort of morality attached to this type of craftsmanship making things was a craft and it was one judged by criteria that today we wouldn't necessarily recognize as those which we would define art by so how did they judge things that had been crafted by hand well I think almost certainly the most important criterion that was used to judge how impressive how important or how beautiful an object was was quite simply its costliness if you look at contemporary descriptions the cost of an object is the thing that is most frequently commented upon either in admiration because it's of gold or silver the content of precious metals was admired or disparagingly if it was felt that something looked rather cheap so cost was the first thing that people took into account in what I suppose we would call aesthetic appreciation but they were also interested in the craftsmanship of the object which at the time was described as cunning the skill with which something was made and this cunning was equally applied to a dagger to a fine coat to a gold goblet or to an alabaster tomb chest then the third criteria I think was novelty a much prized characteristic then as it is today but the hunger for novelty in the 16th century was actually very intense and new forms of decoration new manufacturing techniques and new types of object were always hungrily sought and then finally there was the concept of placement the relationship that one thing had with another thing so an incredibly magnificent display of gold plate which was set on a beautifully carved wooden buffet against a rich tapestry woven with gold would be regarded as a glittering aesthetic success because of the placement because of the juxtaposition one to the other so contemporaries who wrote about what they saw judged everything against cost cunning novelty and placement now if we were to take the example of Cardinal Wolsey contemporary biographer George Cavendish he described the splendor with which Wolsey gave an entertainment to a French Embassy at Hampton Court in 1527 this embassy was entertained at Hampton Court for a couple of days before moving on to Greenwich where the king was going to entertain them and this is what Cavendish writes and I quote the King was privy of all this worthy feast at Hampton Court and intended to far exceeds the same but to describe the dishes the subtleties in other words the desserts and the many strange devices and ordered the same I do both lack wikked in my gross old head and cunning in my bowels to declare the wonderful and curious imaginations in the same invented and devised yet did this entertainment far exceed the same as gold silver in weight and value wonderful and curious imaginations were the mainspring of Tudor art and architecture and were criteria I think quite different from those which we apply to art today our approach to looking at art today is to a great extent based on principles laid down in the early 20th century considering art and architecture and how each artist and architect has their own personal style that existed within a national style and within a period style and from this the identification of personal period and national styles and naming them has been one of the primary activities of art historians but tonight we need to start with the point that nobody in 16th century England bothered to sit down and write anything about what they thought about what we call art let alone what they thought about style in a sense that it could be categorized in a modern sense so to get some sort of clarity we have to stop thinking about art and have to start thinking about objects with which the wealthy surrounded themselves and in doing this I need to take a step backwards and ask well when was it exactly when wealthy men and women of society came to amass beautiful objects which were not only a functional value to them but were had a decorative purpose and to do this I want to start briefly thinking about the men and women who surrounded the monarch in their household now I think there's a very important distinction between a household and a court a household is an organization that sort of makes everything possible around you it cooks your meals it sort of organizes your daily activities a court I think is a much more amorphous concept because it doesn't have a sort of static membership it is the people who are around the monarch at any one time they may might be as friends supporters but the people were sort of the setting of kingship they were ornaments to the Kings power so there's a sense of spectacle to a court whereas household is more than machinery that makes the spectacle possible and a component I'd argue the crucial component of a court is courtliness a code of manners and behaviors to which its members subscribe now early medieval Kings just simply did not have this their closest attendants were tough soldiers used to military action but during the 14th century these war bands which is essentially what they were gradually became more interested in what we would call the arts and tapestry in painting and poetry in sculpture in music and a sort of macho aversion to these things gradually gave way to a sense of artistic accomplishment and at the same time more women were brought into the court softening this sort of rather aggressive mix of people round the monarch now many of these changes you can discern in England perhaps as early as the reign of Henry the 3rd but all of them become a really marked feature in the reign of Richard ii so he's 1377 to $13.99 in fact I think in many ways you can argue that a royal court in a sort of recognizable way to us now sort of begins to exist in his reign and his was a court that expressed an interest in culture it comprised women to a much much greater extent than any previous court and it could portray itself magnificence magnificently and had within it a series of ranks of hierarchy and degrees of status Richard himself loved to wear his crown he was preoccupied by ceremony he loved expensive clothes priceless personal jewelry rich food and as you see on the screen this famous famous portrait done in the mid 13 90s in Westminster Abbey here he is he loved himself being painted by painters but this isn't the paint painting I really want to start with this evening I want to start with the painting that to my mind epitomizes the court of Richard the second best of all and this of course is the Wilton diptych in the National Gallery one of my personal favorite paintings anywhere in the world if the National Gallery burnt down tomorrow it would be this that I'd rushed in and grabbed and carried out you could actually carry this of course some of the other ones would be a little bit tricky so these this this painting was done as a portable altarpiece for the Royal Chapel of Richard ii it's painted on wooden panels and you can see there's a sort of heavenly vision you can see on the the the the left-hand panel here richard ii being presented by three saints to the Virgin and Child and who are in the company of these absolutely delicious angels eleven of them and nearest to Richard is his patron st. John the Baptist and behind uc-san Edward the Confessor and st. Edmund both of these are earlier English kings who had become venerated as Saints now this as you can see from the middle had hinges on it and it folded up and on the outside you can see that was when it was folded it had Richards coats of arms the left hand side and his personal L emblem of a white heart chained with a crown around its neck on the right hand leaf the painting was obviously meant to be looked at from the inside but it could be folded up it could be carried about and when it was all you would have seen is Richards badges and symbols and such heraldry as you see on the left hand panel there of course had started as a system for identifying Knights on the field of battle and during the 13th century it had become a sort of formal system of visual communication which was actually policed by the Royal heralds the shield without any supporters the helm the crest together with mottos badges and seals then became increasingly used by Knights not only on the field and in the tournament but every day to express their nightly status and it was King Henry the 3rd who set the fashion for using such heraldic decoration in the interiors of his buildings and from that point onwards if you had arms you would put them on your possessions and as with almost everything else Henry the 8th took this to ridiculous lengths and his houses were slathered with heraldic devices and there were plenty to choose from since in fact 1198 the Royal shield had three crawling leopards which over the course of time became mysteriously transmogrified into three crouching lions and then became paired with fleur-de-lis to make the Royal Arms we're familiar with and here you can see this is actually Richard the third you can see Richard the thirds boars being supporters with the crown and there you can see the classic expression of the Royal coat of arms and Henry the eighth was very happy to meld these royal arms with the badges of his wife Catherine of Aragon her badge of course was a pomegranate and here you see this wonderful woodcut of the marriage knot of Henry the eighth but his brother Arthur and Catherine of Aragon with the pomegranate and the Tudor Rose but there were lots of ways that the Royal Arms could be expressed this is the most gorgeous manuscript in the British Library dating from the early 16th century and you could see in the bottom panel here and I'll enlarge it here you can see the tudor coat of arms with the supporters the the dragon of Kath wahlid are there and the greyhound and in this case supported by angels with the Garter and the crown of course Henry the eighth's heraldic painters were kept very busy because as Katharine of Aragon's badges were expunged and replaced by Anne Boleyn there was a quite a big change around but all too soon the Leopards which were Anne's supporters had to be altered by Royal Carver's and painters to look like Panthers because they were Jane Seymour's beasts and this particular heraldic problem as you know continued throughout the reign now what we have to remember is that heraldry to us today is a mystery it is obscure but in the 16th century it wasn't thought to be either complex or subtle putting your arms on a painting a tapestry or anywhere on your house or any of your household goods conveyed crucially important messages about your rank and your loyalties heraldic symbols in the early sixteenth century were relatively clean and simple as you can see here they weren't like the later 18th century coats of arms which you see which were very very complicated to reproduce and so these led themselves lent themselves very straightforwardly to artistic display it was the Royal heralds who were responsible for checking that the correct use of badges and arms were was undertaken and what they did is they issued to the Royal painters and Carver's and metal workers books of arms showing how things should be correctly used so this is a painting by Thomas Risley who was garter King of Arms who was intimately involved in every major activity in the court in the first half of Henry's reign he had a workshop in gate not far from here where a team of painters kept all the records that were needed to ensure that everything was done absolutely correctly and so during the preparations for a great ceremony like the field of the cloth of gold and 1520 the governor of Gein wrote in a complete panic to Woolsey asking that Risley should be ordered to produce a book showing all the incredibly complex heraldry necessary for the meeting of the two kings and the decoration of all the things that would be needed the book doesn't survive but the very fact that it was commissioned demonstrates the close working between the Herald's and the Royal craftsmen in fact the King's chief painter a man called John Brown worked so closely with Risley the chief Herald that their workshops were in adjacent houses in gate so royal houses and indeed courtier houses were encrusted with dynastic signs and symbols and indeed many of the occupants of the royal houses themselves were encrusted in royal signs and symbols everybody from the yeoman of the guard to the Lord Chancellor wearing his heavy gold chain of office now you might not have seen one of these before this is a stove tile bathrooms and other small rooms in Tudor royal houses were heated by quite tall ceramic stoves some of height which were made up of individual tiles and here you can see a royal stove tile with if you could see the initials of Henry eight and Edward the Prince Edward HR and ER the fleur-de-lis here and the Tudor Rose and here we have in the middle the Tudor arms with the supporters this is a beautiful but a relatively straightforward piece of interior furniture as you can see encrusted with heraldry the windows of Tudor royal houses likewise this is a piece of royal stained glass from the Victoria and Albert Museum but also encrusted in these device devices as were the objects used at court here you see a particularly beautiful cup designed by Hans Holbein the younger and you can see on the lid the royal crown and on this cup which is a slightly later one just to show you if it carried on going a cup to be presented by to James the first in 1617 you can see in the bottom on the foot there's a coat of arms there there's another one here essentially that the one of the principal vehicles of decoration was in fact heraldry and in fact entering almost any house of any status the first thing you would see was a coat of arms you can see it today if you go to see Hampton Court the Royal Arms weren't only placed on royal buildings because they explicitly showed to whom you old owed loyalty and indeed to whom the house would belong if a royal visit should take place so this is Compton winners the beautiful wonderful house built by Sir William Compton a courtier who held a mass of royal offices under Henry the eighth in Warwickshire built in 1523 and here on the porch of his house here is a huge royal coat of arms the royal badges either side so as you walked into the house it was absolutely clear to whom your loyalty was given but it wasn't only courtiers this is a house called hen grave hall in Suffolk it's built in 1525 by a very wealthy London trader Thomas Kitson and you can see likewise he dedicates his house and expresses his loyalty to the crown by placing the royal arms on the front of it and corporations did likely likewise here is Trinity College Cambridge with statue of the old boy here at the top and coats coats of arms not only of the king but of some of his predecessors below now this use of heraldry on the complete gamut of decorative objects in houses and the houses themselves was not just a game because the incorrect or the inappropriate use of arms particularly anything look that looked like the misuse of the Royal Arms could lead the users into severe danger the whole system of Heron heraldry was ruthlessly policed and patrolled by the Royal heralds and their reports could turn what looks to us like a innocent Durham decorative device into quite literally a death warrant in the mid 1540s Henry the eighth became convinced that this man Henry Thomas Howard the Earl of Surrey was planning to somehow user the crown from the future King Edward 6th the matter came to a head when he courted the arms of Edward the Confessor with his own an act that made his coat of arms look like those of the heir to the throne in fact he was technically speaking justified in in in in in doing this but choosing this particular moment to emphasize his very distant royal connections was not a very good idea here is sorry as I say and you can see to his left here and to his right here incredibly prominently the arms of Edward the second that's on the left and Edward the third on the right and this here is the highly controversial quartering that he undertook this quartering which included and the Royal Arms in it led to his arrest and his imprisonment and also the imprisonment of his father and they were both sentenced to death on the 13th of January 1547 on the charge of treason ibly quartering the King's Arms can you believe that that is how serious his father very luckily survived execution because the King died the day before he was about to have his head cut off but the son was executed and here is his tomb chest and you can see his tomb chest and contains his arms including the controversial arms which by that stage he might as well put them on the tomb because he'd had his head cut off anyway so this cautionary tale tells us that though heraldry was as we will continue to see this evening one of the most important decorative devices of the 16th century it was not just a game it contained crucial messages about rank and hierarchy and show the way that decoration and the hard-edged issues of power wealth and rank were intimately entwined now while during the whole of the 16th century heraldry was never superseded as the primary vehicle for display in everything from gate houses to domestic tableware here is a 16th century urn you can see with someone's arms on it in the middle newest reams of thought and inspiration were becoming available to patrons designers and craftsmen from around 1515 we can remember that the courts of Henry the seventh and Henry the eighth were actually very cosmopolitan places the members of the court most of them were bilingual speaking fluent French many of them also spoke Latin and most of them had traveled abroad low countries to France and many of them as far as Spain and a very small number had even gone to Italy and there was a strong sense in the these courts up until the 1530s that the English were part of the universal culture of read Western Christendom and the City of London was a major center of trade and this of course reinforced these major international cultural ties and so there were many arteries through which artistic influences flowed into into England and particularly into London but from the mid 14 90s Northern Europe increasingly began to be exposed to fashions from Italy this was largely due to the fact that the French King Charles the Eighth had invaded Italy and over a period of 20 years or so his aristocrats as diplomats his merchants and soldiers had helped diffuse across Europe what they had seen in the northern Italian campaigns and thus into England via France and from northern European countries came an enthusiasm for a new type of decoration known as the antique this term which I think you can first identify the first references I found to it in in in the literature around 1513 refers to any type of decoration that draws its inspiration from ancient Rome and in particular it referred to a new type of decoration as grotesque work which was invented in the last year's of the 15th century this came about because in the 1490s a group of intrepid painters began to break their way into the maze of underground passages and caverns that made up the barrett buried remains of the Domus Aurea the golden house of the emperor Nero and this through smoking torches is what they found painted on the ceilings of these Roman interiors the golden house was a megalomaniac building project that made Henry the eighth's buildings look positively puny it was a vast villa set in landscaped gardens covering 300 acres and it was described by the ancient Roman historian Suetonius as leonis Li prodigal but these until these explorers found their way into these Buried rooms nobody had ever seen the decorated interior of Roman buildings before but painters like Pinter Akio by the light of their burning torches found this incredible Wonderland and they turned it into a new form of contemporary interior decoration here is Pinter akio's library in Siena the piccolo Meeny library and you can see the way that he was inspired by the use of Roman masks and vessels and shields and plates and helmets and breastplates most often linked together by a sort of crazy candelabra into a sort of tottering tower of treasure normally framed by putting and swirling foliage and by the 1500s this stuff which we call grotesque work and hopefully you can sort of see the sort of candelabra effect here - running up the middle it's on it on a sort of stalk here became all the rage and so here you see an English painting this of course is Archbishop Cranmer painted by the German painter Gerlach flick and I hope you can see on the left-hand side this pillar here contains one of these grotesque work tears of of swirling vessels and masks and breastplates and exception now in disseminating this fashion printing was hugely important and from the 14 sixties in England craftsmen of all sorts were using printed sheets and books as an inspiration for bringing this grotesque work into a people's upper class peoples and homes most of these books were produced in Germany some of them some in France but in 1504 and Henry the seventh appointed Richard Pinson to be his official printer and a 1518 Pinson produced the first English title with grotesque decoration up the side here commissioned by Henry the eighth this very first printing here and from this point onward prints became the fundamental source of inspiration and everything stone carving stained-glass textiles metalwork was influenced by these prints even the great Holbein himself as he's painting the white or mural this decoration up here comes is taken from printed sources acquired from from Germany or France and here you see that lovely writing desk in the V&A you may be familiar with this probably belonged to Henry the 8th and all the decoration you can see on this wonderful piece of furniture here is taken from printed sources and so enterprising designers and printed printers collected together these designs and they issued them in patent books there's a very nice introduction to one of these books in printed in 1538 and it says in in the front is an introduction to this and I quote it says I have assembled an anthology of exotic and difficult details that should guide the artists who are burdened with wife and children and those who have not traveled some of equivalent disadvantages in life and so both patrons and artists owned these books and it's quite easy to find quite a number of things that are influenced by them here's this great Tudor house Elizabethan house in Northamptonshire this is Kirby Hall and you can see these giant pallister's here incredibly detailed carved decoration which is taken directly from the front page of this book here the first and chief grounds of architecture by John shoot published in 15 m-80s 87 and if we look again at this stove tile we will see the way that these grotesques have come in either side and if you see the cup design you can see that essentially this is a based on grotesque work as in fact indeed is the decoration in the painting of Thomas Thomas had now the way that these new streams of decoration came in are a key to understanding how tastes changed in the Tudor period but so far I have been speaking about decoration I now want to move on to the most important and admired art form of the age which was tapestry now we have to remember this very important point and that is the textiles and plate were the two things that were most admired in Tudor in Tereus and this is given great weight by this wonderful drawing a very very wet rare drawing this is drawing by Holbein showing thomas moore and his family at home hardly any accurate illustrations survived of a tudor interior and what is very noticeable about this interior is lots of plate can you see here plate there on the buffet plate here that's on the left hand side on the right hand side plate of course they're all then wearing lots of jewels wonderful textiles textiles handing on hanging on the wall not a painting to be seen anywhere because for the modern eye the single biggest impact that we would have felt on entering the house of a rich 16th century courtier or a row palace would have been the huge quantity of tapestry in the early 16th century most of this was woven in the Low Countries either bought off the peg from merchants or if you were very rich specially and commissioned the quality varied enormously the best stuff as you can see in this detail here was shot through with gold and silver thread it was known as heiress and very few people other than the king and the most wealthy bishops would would own this but even for contemporaries rooms hung with heiress would have been incredibly arresting most tapestry was less glitzy and less valuable and was woven with varying mixtures of silk and wool so wool tapestry you could buy for about eight pence an L and L is 27 inches silk was a bit more expensive it was three shillings and fourpence and L and if he wanted to buy her ass it was 40 shillings and L so this is incredibly expensive stuff but tapestry was always integrated with the architectural features in a room and was as I said either made for the room if you were rich certainly in the case of heiress but otherwise if you weren't so rich you would buy your tapestry and you would your room around it hung from a cornice and as it met the floor you usually usually had a black painted skirting so you couldn't see a sort of glimpse of white rather like a sort of pale sock underneath the end of your trousers you wouldn't want to that the wall to peek out at there at the bottom but at the start of the rain rich patrons hung and bought tapestries in the prevailing style which was for incredibly dense compositions compositions crammed with very large numbers of figures and this is a very good example of the the fashion for tapestry in the first part of Henry the eighth's reign this is the story of King David part of a set a very expensive set he bought in 1528 it cost one thousand five hundred and forty eight pounds which is about the same amount Asthma of money as the mary-rose cost fully equipped with all its guns so that is quite expensive it was a very big set there were ten pieces it covered 420 square yards so a tennis court is is about three hundred square yards so these tapestries are vast and this great set of the story of King David work was hung in the English royal palaces but by the time it was delivered in 1528 it was very old fashioned because fashion had moved on and here you see a set of tapestries that Henry the eighth acquired ten years later in 1538 and this is the story of Sir Paul in nine scenes another incredibly rich weave laden with gold thread thread and it was valued at the King's death at 3,000 pounds the cost of two warships now here you can see I think a startling startling change in style startling I think two people at court it must have indeed changed the whole feel of uh of Tudor rooms these tapestries were less oppressive more three-dimensional much more exciting and these big steps scale tapestries began to be set in interiors that were redecorated to meld together the traditional design elements like heraldry with grotesque work and that it's just one interior that you can get a flavor of this in and that is absent James's Palace in the Tudor Chapel there and you can see that the ceiling there are no types just here now but the work you can see on that ceiling the grotesque work painting and that is joined up with other panels with with heraldic words you can see their vivre at Rex you can see there there's there's a Durham among dois in there so the this heraldry next door to it so the interiors of these houses begin to morph if you like to into a state where they can accept these this new dynamic type of designs well combining antique work and heraldry with the existing vocabulary of architectural design really required a new set of skills and so as well as native craftsmen and craftsmen designers came from all over Europe they were mainly northern European but there were some from Italy and even though the Italians came here they tended to employ French or German assistants and but the Italians did bring a different quality to design and Cardinal Wolsey of course had employed the sculptor Giovanni de Maya know in the early 1520's and he had supplied these terracotta roundels of Roman emperors for Hampton Court and Henry the eighth later commissioned more of these forces James's Greenwich Whitehall and tears also took terra cotta grotesque work in dozens and dozens of of houses another Italian Nicholas pellon of modern er seems to have brought the use of molded stucco work into fashion at court and of course this was extensively used in Henry the eighth's last building work at Nonsuch but what I think is critically important to remember is that this rich stream of decorative and artistic ideas flowing from Europe into England was abruptly cut off as Henry the eighth's broke with Rome there were huge consequences for this and the Reformation became a powerful force for decorative change as much as change in many other spheres Henry the eighth's quarrel of course hadn't been with traditional religion his quarrel had been with the Pope and it led to this assertions unique assertion that England was an empire a realm without any superior on earth a notion that was enshrined of course in the act of Supremacy in 1534 and it was only really through Thomas Cromwell or the process began to lead to theological theological Reformation which was driven through under a clique of Protestant politicians in the reign of Edward the 6th and so by the time we enter the reign of Queen Elizabeth we have not only a political but we have a religious break with Europe and this stopped the import of ideas from Catholic countries and the Italianate grotesques of the first half of the century began to morph into something different a new decorative craze that we know as strap work the most prominent expression of this was first in the gallery Francois premier at Fontainebleau and just outside Paris and you can see here that sometimes some strap work and on the walls and this decorative device was borders of writhing twisting leather belts or straps which then magically turned into faces animals buckles and studs to become a sort of bizarre to partially comic world that echoed the paintings of Bosch and Bruegel they're their contemporaries and of the various designers who worked in this idiom by far the most influential in England was the very prolific and talented young freedom and a phrase and you see one of his designs here and hope you can see that sense of the sort of the writhing and twisting and buckling and had the way these straps magically turn into one thing and then disappear and appear somewhere else and these designs by DeFries were widely circulated and again started to feed in to interior decoration here is the screen at Montacute house in Somerset which is entirely made up of elements from two Freese's books and the mind-boggling over mantel in the Red Lodge and Bristol built in the 1580s and early 90s also the elements here including this big cartouche in the middle is just simply directly copied from a print by DeFries and here to give you another example of the use of strap work is the most in salt this is a whacking great piece of metal work what are the biggest surviving from its age it's made in 1586 to 7 in London and you can see that on this piece their framework is made out of of strap work filled in with various lively motifs and plants and animals now it is no coincidence that I have so far barely mentioned easel painting let's return to the family of Sir Thomas Moore you will not see any paintings hanging on his walls nor will you see a painting in Queen Elizabeth the first withdrawing chamber because the fact was that easel painting was not a particularly prestigious form of craft or decoration in 16th century England one of the main themes of my next lecture will be its rise in importance but for now we need to remember that plate and textiles were infinitely more prized than painted boards even painted boards by a great genius like Holbein one of the issues was that painting was for many Calvinists a problematic and potentially ungodly art not only was there a risk of idolatry which ruled out all religious subjects apart from this one my favorite painting this is the four evangelists staining the Pope which clearly was not him idolatrous but there was also this danger that painters could be accused of copying God's creation God's creation was perfect and there was no need to replicate it or try and improve it and therefore there were waves of iconoclasm that destroyed destroyed huge numbers of easel paintings triptychs and wall murals in the 1520's and 30s and another way that happened again in the 1540s and as a result huge amounts of of religious painting and other paintings that existed in pre-reformation England just disappeared by in by Elizabeth's reign it was realized that as it recognised that used in a secular context an image of a man or a woman for representational the Civic or decorative use was acceptable and even in churches there were moments that were really representative of people in fact a writer in the 1590s could say and I quote now every citizens wife that wears a kurtal and a velvet hat must have her picture hanging in the parlor now this was exaggerated but what is certainly the case was that by the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign it wasn't only royal and aristocratic houses that contained portraits but also the houses of wealthy merchants although there were very few painters who created what we would regard as great works of art like hands you earth isaac oliver nicholas hilliard many of the lesser painters concentrated on trying to achieve a likeness these likenesses were most often commissioned to commemorate an event in a person's life and the yardstick that was used wasn't some level of artistic achievement but whether the picture looked like its subject so here is the portrait of the 37 year old Hebrew scholar and divine Huw Broughton in Christ's College Cambridge it was painted to commemorate the first the publication of his first book which he holds in his hand in 1588 and his position as tutor to a wealthy family and you can see all the things you'd expect the book which he's doing a pair of gloves to show that he's a gentleman his coat of arms more books the date his age the year this contains a huge amount of information these paintings conveyed information about the sitter their likeness their status their interests their achievements their age and it was for this reason that Elizabeth the first tried to start to control portraits of herself yes of course this was partly motivated by vanity but portraits that contained information could also contain miss information and the Privy Council was ordered by the Queen to seek out bad portraits of herself and have them burned she was then asked them to ensure that any new portraits were approved by the Sargent painter the solution to this state control of images of the Queen was to produce an official likeness and then licensed people to copy it this was not particularly easy as the Queen was extremely reluctant to sit for a portrait unlike queen elizabeth ii who has been painted by hundreds of people Elizabeth the first as far as we know only actually sat in in life for five painters nevertheless there was a very urgent need to produce portraits of the Queen she of course had been excommunicated by the Pope in 1570 and the display of a royal portrait was a gold plated symbol of loyalty one that many felt good to insure themselves with you could buy a reasonably good likeness of Elizabeth the first for around ten pounds and this meant that most families of any substance probably had a portrait of the Queen and the aristocrat the aristocracy had probably several portraits and around which their family portraits might be hung now I am deliberately showing you here a middle-of-the-road Elizabethan portrait it's a variant or one of the many official versions painted towards the end of the 16th century and it perpetuates the official ageless image of the Queen that had become fixed as the official official biography by that date face is angular it's a sort of mask like icon and her torso is a dazzled by a mass of jewelry pearls embroideries and images such the as these produced in great numbers represented the loyalty of the subject and they were objects of near religious devotion now as I've suggested and this evening the things that we consider to be art today had meanings and powers in the sixteenth century that we now have to decode it's for this reason that I think they've been quite a lot of misunderstandings about the consequences of the great wealth and power of many subjects the fall of Cardinal Wolsey on the Left there is very often attributed to his overblown architectural ambition and his gargantuan appetite for tapestry and and plate and other beautiful objects but I think to see it this way is to fundamentally misunderstand the situation because in the 16th century subjects of the highest rank were not only permitted but were encouraged to amass huge amounts of what we would describe as art and place it in their own great buildings on the right hand side of this screen you can see William warum the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1503 to 1532 and he was also a large chuk Lord Chancellor he doesn't get a look-in in the story because Cardinal Wolsey is so famous and sort of Falls because of his wealth supposedly Wareham arguably was richer than Wolsey and of course when you go into the reign of Queen Elizabeth Lord Burleigh didn't build one but two absolutely enormous houses you've got M Tibbles which is now gone which was far bigger than Burleigh house and if you've been to Burleigh House you know how big that is these houses were far larger far more spectacular than anything that Elizabeth the first had ever built and many of the contents of Tibbles would have equalled the magnificence of the possessions of the Queen but these things were expected and they were enjoyed by Elizabeth they weren't resented or stopped by her it was only when the accepted hierarchy was subvert adore challenged as in the case of the Earl of Surrey when there was a problem so my talk this evening forms an introduction to how the two thought about what we call art there was no hushed veneration for artworks or artists merely the question of what the craftsman could do for the patron these craft objects were appreciated for their beauty but they were importantly created for a symbolic meaning next time we shall see how that began to change and how craft began to turn into the art and what that art tells us about 17th century society thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Gresham College

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Keywords: Gresham, Gresham College, Education, Lecture, Public, London, Debate, Academia, Knowledge, built environment, architecture, art, power, tudor, tudor period, tudor history, history, Simon Thurley, Tudor England, wealth, politics, religion, international relations

Id: L-vAfBhcKdU

Length: 53min 50sec (3230 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 25 2018